- The dynamic post-hardcore trio brings on Olan Monk, James K and more, fine-tuning their collagist sensibilities to incise new emotional depths.
- For Moin, the formula for compelling guitar music begins with drums. The London-based trio, comprising Joe Andrews, Tom Halstead and percussionist Valentina Magaletti, have honed an unconventional approach to shape their post-hardcore, groove-bearing sound. Across most of their tracks, Moin's process begins with snippets of Magaletti's dynamic drums, forming a percussive skeleton around which Andrews and Halstead layer guitar and electronic vocal samples. They cut, paste, manipulate and then re-manipulate these components to coax forth a sound that feels raw and human, music in the lineage of post-hardcore bands like Slint and Fugazi.
The band's origins trace back to a London house party, where Andrews and Halstead were introduced to Magaletti, who had been performing that night. Andrews and Halstead had been crafting cavernous goth and industrial dub under the Raime alias. Long interested in the possibilities rock could offer, they even cut their teeth on experimentations with '90s post-hardcore on 2016 release Tooth. Magaletti's stylistically diverse percussion work has been a prolific force in the experimental electronic scene. Just this year, she put out the dub-infused record I as Holy Tongue and an acoustic interpretation of batida with Afro-Portuguese artist Nídia. Eventually, after years of collaborating with Magaletti on Raime releases, the duo asked her to officially join them on a project they had been teasing since 2012: Moin.
Moin once attributed their sound to a desire to explore the fringes of guitar music. Their music deconstructs the canon, stepping into the role of technological mediator to rework familiar motifs from hardcore, punk rock, grime and indie genres just beyond recognition. Since their first formal foray into the arena with Moot! in 2021, a growing number of electronic artists have dipped their toes into rock and punk. Moin explores these genres with a more disoriented, biting edge than outfits from the UK like bar italia and Still House Plants.They made stomachs drop on 2022's antagonistic Paste, with anonymous voices throwing out fighting words like: "You don't know me / But I sure as fuck know you." Moin understands that sometimes when legibility is allowed to take a back seat, emotion has room to grab the steering wheel.
What's different about their third album, You Never End, is that it features contributions from an extensive roster of vocalists, most of whom are drawn from label AD 93's impressive Rolodex of affiliates. Brought into the fold are Irish "heavy pop" musician Olan Monk, New York ambient pop artist James K and post-grime South East London vocalist Coby Sey. This introduction of voices with names and faces signals a shift for the band, which previously incorporated spoken word and vocal samples culled from the internet to lend a sense of narrative to their music sans the traditional rock band's lead singer. Previous releases took inspiration from '80s and '90s hardcore bands, whose lyrics, though dogmatic in delivery, were often cryptic, if not vacant.
As a project borne of collaboration, Moin taps into something deeper on You Never End. On this album, their draw lies not in decontextualization but in their ability to re-assemble new worlds through connection. Moin uses vocals as building blocks, sculptural instruments that give structure to the band's distinctive brand of weighty composition. On "We Know What Gives," in the gaps between math rock guitar twangs, Coby Sey's mantra: "Made of concrete, made of all sorts really," is almost architectural. His rapping typically feels muted and murmurous, burbling forth against the flow of a city's background noises, but here he intones at a deeper register, becoming a scaffolding for ricocheting chopped-and-screwed vocal samples. On "What If You Didn't Need a Reason," James K's coo, usually melting into shoegaze, becomes haunting and raw over pouty electric guitar.
While the band still revels in re-constructing shadowy, bracing walls of sound, the experimentation is driven less by form and more by feeling. Standalone tracks sketch rapturous grooves, marrying buoyant guitar progressions with rhythmic vocal samples. On "C'mon Dive" a soaring sung hook orbits around a pitched-down soundbite of muffled provocation. The effect: a spaciousness that invites introspection. As "It's Messy Coping" is subsumed by roaring guitar chords, a cartoonish yelp loops like a finished record. Meanwhile, on "Anything But Sopo" the album fully gives way to playful jubilance, with a chorus bobbing and weaving around crunchy guitar and rolling drums in a sort of vocal whack-a-mole. Unvarnished, throaty yells of "So. Po. Sopo!" feel like an exuberant exercise of the phenomenon that the more you say something, the less it seems to mean anything at all.
With less technical mimicry and the addition of vocalists, Moin introduce greater lucidity and emotional depth. This maturation comes through best when Sophia Al-Maria starts "Lift You." Here, in a rare personal note for the band, she confides, "I just wanna say I really appreciate this 'cause nobody ever asks to use my voice for a track." In her homage to Etel Adnan's poem, "To Be In A Time of War," lyrics like "To read in a time of war / To read it again / Think about it / To read it aloud / To record it / To try again / To listen back / To send and unsend" are punctuated only by Magaletti's compacted drumbeat and jangling strains of guitar. Mageletti's crisp hi-hats decelerate, syncing the tempo to the rhythms of living with heightened anxiety. The song invokes a cinema reminiscent of the sweeping landscapes of Raime's discography. Direct, zoomed in and stripped down, it is clear that on any scale, Moin are masters of capturing the kinetic.
Tracklist01. Guess It's Wrecked feat. Olan Monk
02. Cubby
03. Family Way feat. Sophia Al-Maria
04. What If You Didn't Need A Reason feat. james K
05. Lift You feat. Sophia Al-Maria
06. It's Messy Coping
07. We Know What Gives feat. Coby Sey
08. C'mon Dive
09. Anything But Sopo
10. Happy In The Wrong Way
11. Just Married