There is something deeply rotten throughout the island of Britain at the moment, and even more miserably so in London, its moribund capital. Everyone I know is depressed; everyone you know is depressed. And every time you venture to a major population centre, it looks like Disco Elysium: everyone there is also depressed. A shared misery, a universal weariness, the wreckage from decades of managed decline are there for all to see – but there isn’t really an abundance of art that properly encapsulates this phenomena.
There’s no shortage of righteous fury in the music of 2024’s London. But this zeitgeist feeling isn’t (at least, at the time of writing) a writhing anger. It is a detached and dissociated malaise. Exhausted and overstimulated. A collective nostalgia for when times were slightly more livable, and the shared burden of the knowledge that things have never really been particularly comfortable in the lifetimes of many of us.
This is why You Never End, the new album by London trio Moin, just feels right – the music of now. In 2024, their liminal and confusing take on rock music is perfectly in sync with the cold and detached world into which it is born.
This isn’t Moin’s first rodeo. Their barbed 2021 debut, Moot!, and its stellar follow-up, Paste, saw the group fashion a kind of uncanny, cut-up sound that combined garbled vocal samples, dislocated rhythms, and disembodied guitars reminiscent of a whole cannon of 80s and 90s guitar music. Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews continue the work of their brutalist electronic outfit Raime, except the palette here is almost solely centred around guitars, whilst renowned drummer Valentina Magaletti provides a polyrhythmic exoskeleton that propels each track forwards.
Moin’s achievement in their work to date is that they are able to find an alternative rock parallel to Broadcast’s distant unravelling of sunshine pop. Collaging scribbles of shoegaze and post-hardcore guitars with a toolbox of unidentifiable noises, Moin create something that is low-key nostalgic, but also dissociated and overstimulated in a very modern way. The group coined “post-whatever” for this deconstructed rock sound, and that feels especially apt on You Never End.
Their third full length sees a sharp retooling of their arsenal, as Moin fundamentally alter the way they use the human voice. The album is rife with collaborations. Where before samples were murky, ambiguous and hard to place, the vocals here are the result of different artists and writers interpreting Moin’s cold world and embellishing it with their own words.
On 2023’s Clocked Off EP, the trio brought in percussionist and vocalist Fritz Welch to juxtapose the skronk of ‘I Can I Can’t’ with his irreverent monologues. They clearly got a taste for the interplay between their instruments and another’s voice. Half of the songs on You Never End are made with vocal collaborators, and the collaborators are always placed front and centre of their tracks, rather than just allowed to become another layer of the miasma.
‘We Know What Gives’ is the best example of this. It sees Lewisham dabbler Coby Sey imbue Moin’s music with the same sense of claustrophobia that characterised his stunning 2022 album, Conduit. It feels like it could be one of Sey’s own tomes. “Made of concrete, made of allsorts, really,” he mumbles. “It’s like we’re living folklores here, really.” Meanwhile, Moin match the liminal bars with disaffected grunge noodling, a slew of chopped samples, and a cathartic, staggering drum beat, to concoct a novel fusion of the two acts’ styles.
Qatari-American writer Sophia Al-Maria is responsible for two songs on the album, her spectral speaking voice the perfect partner to the glacial instrumentals. ‘Family Way’ is a kind of Melvins dirge, all swelling guitar drone detritus, whilst ‘Lift You’ is a waning post-punk number. On each, Al-Maria’s spoken words match the moods of paranoia and isolation perfectly, and you can almost imagine the existence of a full-time band in the image of these songs.
Elsewhere, features come from Ireland’s Olan Monk and New York’s james K, rounding out a worldwide cast united by Moin’s mission statement. K’s reverb-drenched vocals give a heavenly touch to the grumbling grunge of ‘What If You Didn’t Need A Reason’, whilst Monk’s sprechstimme turns ‘Guess It’s Wrecked’ into a barbed garage rock nugget.
Moin have definitely still got it when they’re on their own, though, as this album flies without the features too. You Never End’s glowing final three-track run is testament to this. They perfect the abstract, “post-whatever” brand of guitar music that the first two records strive for, as the closing triptych melds a series of genuinely incongruous elements together perfectly. I would say seamlessly, but the seams are on show. The evidence that everything has been cut up and sewn back together again is there for all to see, but this only adds to the feeling of disembodiment the band evoke.
Referenced artists
Valentina Magaletti
The Strange World Of… Takuroku
Raime
GIFwave, Groundhog Day & Culture After The Apocalypse
Sophia Al Maria
Remembering The Future: An Interview with Monira Al Qadiri
Broadcast
Compilation of the Week: Broadcast’s Distant Call
Coby Sey
Mist Through The Bits: Dreaming With Coby Sey’s Conduit
Fucked jam ‘Anything But Sopo’ is rich in ideas, as Halstead and Andrews entangle the track in jagged riffs and Magaletti conjures a series of virtuoso drum patterns, seeming seldom to repeat a single idea. ‘Happy In The Wrong Way’ is a swollen shoegaze number in the vein of A.R Kane, a dizzying reverb daze. Closer ‘Just Married’ benefits from a much sparser arrangement, rolling credits on the album with a series of found vocals, scrambled of all meaning. Acoustic guitars somehow sound like breaking glass.
You Never End will enter the world on a maudlin, rainy Friday, and this will no doubt amplify its power. Grainy, gravelly, gristly, this abstract rock album emphatically gives a musical vocabulary to the exhausted and confused. That doesn’t make it a dreary, miserable listen though. Far from it. From immensely satisfying Fugazi-like guitar licks, to powerhouse drumming that makes even the most abstract sections groove, You Never End is a liberating listen, and perhaps the most modern guitar album of the year.
