warmachine are a three-piece from Boston who create atmospheres that exist in the crosshairs of shoegaze, noise rock, and psychedelia. The band is made up of Arro X. Niskey (bass, vocals, guitar, synth), Lex Pappas (guitar, vocals, synth, artwork), and Brendan Fullerton on drums. The band have released their debut album titled HELLPHONE 3D, containing six sprawling tracks that stretch up to over ten minutes in length. With this space, the songs are able to fully form and develop at whatever pace they require. Nothing feels rushed, giving the album a slow-burning momentum that rewards patience and immersion.
Opening track “hypnagogia” starts the album off with a hypnotic, circular guitar riff that puts you into a trance. It swells to a steady melody as the vocals gingerly fold in, while the drums build to drive the track forward before finally caving in to a wall of sound and screeching vocals. “hello spring” follows with another focused, steady rhythm before the vocals come in with extra distortion and just a touch of melody.
“infection model” follows an opposite template, dropping in with immediate noise that soon succeeds to allow a gentle melody to hover right on through. Textures of spoken word suspended in a well of echoes are woven into the track along with a heavy, thrash-metal style breakdown that makes an appearance just before the more calm and familiar melody end of the song. Producer of the album, River Hartley, makes an appearance on this track with the Casio.
“noita” flips back to warmachine’s lighter, gradual sonic immersion we are introduced to in the front-end of the album. Sparse instrumentation and drum fills open up the track before it falls into a melody with mesmeric vocals that guide you through the contours of the song’s ten-minute runtime. The vocals morph to screams at times, and the instrumentation culminates to noise. “twice stabbed” is the more poetic of the tracks, with spoken word as the main vocal delivery choice and a constant, higher tempo rhythm that carries the direction of the song with the current. In the band’s signature fashion, this rhythmic current collides to a full on storm but the end of the song.
The final track on the album, “i,” feels like a grand finale, where warmachine give their all in slamming their instruments to create a heavy catharsis. The light guitar melody that opens the track also closes it out, showing how the band is able to subtly hold onto these pieces of the song while still completely shattering and rebuilding everything else.
HELLPHONE 3D is a concise, yet impressionable debut album from a band unafraid to take risks, stepping into its own identity. warmachine display a sonic world where abrasion and beauty can be co-conspirators that equally feed into each other. Their long-form song structures feel like environments where you can get lost in, where patience is rewarded.
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