Deerhoof

Through the exhaustion it persists. gnaw’s glowing power pop collages draw deep from a tired tension: a perpetually shifting negotiation between '90s alt-rock romanticism fuzzed out upon machine-gun drumming; pummeling riffage mangled through digital processing and noise; tales traversing lingering memory and motion, mesmerised by hypergaze-influenced joy rushes. 

On Inside a Machine That’s Still Glistening, the three-piece draw from that weighty palette to weave four songs that glow amidst the grit, built from ghosts in the wake of grim times. There’s a curious yet never overbearing darkness to them: confessionals channelled through Daniel Lim’s serrated, at times math-y guitar work, dancing between Tara Tan’s cautious, whispery vocals. Navigating a spectrum from sheer wonder (Star) to fears (Gash) and fatigue (This Is My Life), Tan’s personal stories fluidly shift from dreamy to dramatic, questioning the self’s frustrations, whether in ways cyclical or cynical. 

Meanwhile, Zakhran Khan’s fine-tuned rhythms rip into these sincere questions, at times accelerating into torrents of catharsis, while at others simply adding to moments triumphant. Fighting manic from the mechanical, framing magic in something ever-morphing, these songs are birthed from a process of trying again and again. Confronting the wear of time, thoughts that stay at the back of the mind, the chase accompanying these songs emits a hopeful glimmer, simply waiting to gush out.