Aluminum - Iconoclast HaHa Aluminum

• RIYL: My Bloody Valentine, Iceage, Band of Susans, Jesus and Mary Chain, Happy Mondays, 80s SST Records, Strawberry Switchblade, Black Tambourine, Primal Scream

San Francisco four-piece Aluminum take the shoegaze, big beat, and alt-pop of their debut, Fully Beat (Felte, 2024), and raise the temperature to a boil. In contrast to previous self-recorded efforts, the album comprises a set of electrifying, full-band studio performances all recorded, mixed, and mastered across an inspired week with recording engineer Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden Studio in Oakland.

Lead vocalists and songwriters Marc Leyda and Ryann Gonsalves continue to strike a balance between pop catchiness and experimental abandon while infusing these songs with spontaneity, immediacy, and post-punk tenacity. “We intended for this to be a more guitar-forward album,” notes Leyda, “so we recorded through Marshall stacks to give it a heavier feel, and to get a faster, more punkish sound that will be massive and immersive in a live setting.”

The indelible guitar hook of “Give Me A Reason” weaves through a mix of fuzzed-out and clean tones backed by Rick Altieri’s powerful drums. Floating above are Leyda and Gonsalves’s call-and-response vocals, which are at once playful, sincere, and urgent, making for an ecstatic, unforgettable opening statement. Lead single, “Killing Time”, is a technicolor noise-pop gem with enormous energy, cleverly balanced by the cool sneer of Gonsalves’s refrain: “You want it all / And you want me / Packaged up so politely”. She explains, “This one comes from the frustration of living within a system that sets you up for failure, always ‘not being enough’ or ‘being too much’, and all the anger, exhaustion, and pressure to comply.”

Leyda elaborates, “Much of the album comes from the ambient stress and uncertainty of our current place in time, and how it can affect both external and internal reality.” He wrote the explosive, two-minute jam “Lovely People” about an unsettling dream in which he “woke up in a field, surrounded by hundreds of people with sinister smiles, all walking hastily toward the horizon, as if rushing to reach something beautiful out of view.” The song’s careening pace and disorienting tempo changeups put it in league with the best early SST bands, based on a kindred catharsis born from disillusionment.

Gonsalves’s honeyed harmonies on “Distant Noise” recall cult 90s acts like that dog. and Luscious Jackson, drifting above heavy riffs and acoustic strums led by guitarist Austin Montanari, while cascading clusters of effects haunt the edges. Elsewhere, “An Opportunist" pairs a dancefloor thump with disaffected vocals and grainy, kaleidoscopic textures, while octopus-armed drumming drives “Styptic Powder” through multiform, ever-intensifying peaks of noisy euphoria.