YHWH Nailgun have always been gut-punchingly direct. Even in their primitive, 2020 form —vocalist Zack Borzone, drummer Sam Pickard—they were a two-headed juggernaut, Borzone’s unearthly grunts and yowls set against Pickard’s pummeling percussion. Refreshingly unmitigated by winking cultural signifiers, their sound felt like a direct challenge to the tepid irony of the 2010s indie rock milieu.

Based in New York, Nailgun have been a fully fledged four-piece since 2022, and their sound is as vicious now as it was then. But they’re not antagonizing anyone else’s style, they say. Not jam bands, though only one of their songs has ever crossed the three-minute mark. Not pop stars, though Borzone’s rabid delivery is still the polar opposite of canned melodrama. Not even to millennial indie rockers. Like their cataclysmic 2025 debut LP 45 Pounds, their new album Magazine, proves the only thing they can truly be defined against is definition itself.

Operating in a gray area between stylistic and emotional registers, guitarist and producer Saguiv Rosenstock says, is like walking a tight rope. There’s a subtle humor behind the band’s sound that steers it away from the realm of the self-serious, but it never gets in the way of the music’s visceral impact. “I think it has to do with not thinking too much about yourself in a way that relates to the ego,” he says. “Obviously you're still a self-aware human being and you have your own taste, but you're not trying to hammer that in—just letting go and trusting your own instincts.”

“And trusting each other,” synth player Jack Tobias adds. “It’s just the four of us in a room making music, and what’s outside the room isn’t important to that.” Magazine, a project whose 10 songs occupy a space of 11 minutes altogether, fades in slowly, a furious drum beat and frantic, high-pitched guitar swimming into focus for the first 10 seconds of opener “Ghost of Love.” It’s a concept they got from Brian Wilson’s thoughts on the fade-out of “God Only Knows,” Tobias says—not the fade itself, but the idea that it represents a link to eternity. “On a 10-minute album, it’s a privation,” Rosenstock elaborates. “There's more to it that you don't get to hear. It's like the song already existed or the band was already playing.”

The new record is markedly different from 45 Pounds, beyond being half of that album’s already diminutive length. Pickard, for instance, ditched the rototoms that helped him create the thrilling drum sounds of YHWH’s first record in favor of a skeletal sound that feels more in keeping with the band’s no-frills approach. Most notable, though, is the striking clarity of Borzone’s vocals as he steps out from the shadows of reverb and delay that cloaked his previous performances. “I didn’t want anything to be hidden behind abstraction anymore,” he says.

As immediate and raw as his largely incomprehensible death rattles have been on tracks past, his power doubles when his darkly imagistic lyrics are laid bare. “Ashes rolling in like a flood / I give blood / From my eyes,” he rasps over an air-raid synth and bruising drum fills on “Give Blood,” later describing a “Serpent long as a limousine / Vision of sins unseen.”

Borzone has always been interested in religious iconography and symbolic language. YHWH itself is the proper name of the Hebrew God, unpronounceable by Jewish law (but pronounced “Yahweh” in practice). And now that his voice is finally undisguised, we hear his musings on God and the Devil. “Serpent eater / Sucking on a feast,” he chants on “To the Devil,” Magazine’s closing track. “To the devil / To the beast / Go in peace.”

It’s a message YHWH Nailgun seem to have taken to heart as they continue to hone their hellacious sound, unconcerned with the world outside their practice room. “You can look at all these other things as negative, like you’re tearing down a structure, or you can build your own autonomous structure,” Pickard says. “I like to think about it like, ‘Here’s our little set of values; let’s just work within those without trying to be reactionary.’ I don’t think being reactionary usually leads to anything cool.”

Borzone, Rosenstock, Pickard, and Tobias freely admit to kickstarting their creative process as most bands do, with a jam. Their goal, though, has always been to capture “quick bursts” of brilliance and snatch them from the void. In this context, Magazine can be thought of as a fractured piece of a much longer LP—one that spins infinitely, never reaching the end of a side. “Peace, peace,” Borzone whispers as “To the Devil” rumbles to a lingering finish, fading back into the ether