Are Moin a band? They are three people who play music together and write “songs,” so technically, probably, yes. But the trio’s approach to composition is lopsided, wonky. They aren’t splatter-paint artists, not quite, but they have a slash-and-burn approach to what is essentially rock music. Perhaps that’s because two of the band’s three members have spent much of their music careers not making it.
For the decade preceding Moin’s debut album in 2021, Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews were active as the electronic duo Raime. The music they made was moody and oblong, stark soundscapes with rapid percussion and interjections of haunted synthesizer. Their music was dark, interested in texture more than rhythm. They were more techno-adjacent than techno. Their 2012 album Quarter Tones Over a Living Line features recordings of string instruments deconstructed and reconstituted atop a bed of industrial grumbling.
So it was quizzical if, in retrospect, not surprising when, three years ago, they rekindled a short-lived alliance with the powerhouse drummer Valentina Magaletti as Moin. What were these heady electronic dudes doing playing around on guitar? On the group’s debut, Moot!, we got the answer: They were doing just that—playing around. And thank God for that.
Moot! is the most conventional of Moin’s three albums, a (relatively) straight-ahead instrumental post-hardcore record. With a grayscale tone and guitars that howl like wolves, it would have been a natural extension of Raime’s sound were it not for the addition of Magaletti—a prolific, boundaryless player, with experience in improv, house, pop, and more. Her asymmetrical percussion rhythms were the album’s defining feature. While Halstead and Andrews were noodling away scientifically, she sounded like 10 subway bucket drummers playing all at once.
On their second album, Paste, the group added more pronounced vocal samples, to great effect. A spoken-word snippet by writer Lynne Tillman, saying that a man hung up on her, is mesmerizing, disorienting, placed against a woozy drum beat and plinky guitar. Another song, “Forgetting Is Like Syrup,” includes a slowed-down vocal sample that eventually disintegrates with a cassette-jammed-in-the-tape-deck effect. The album is weird and haunted, less linear than Moot! but more substantive.
You Never End somehow moves both closer and further from the center. There’s more glee, less terror. The songs slither. It’s a stretch to say there is regular rhythm here, but some songs do dance. “It’s Messy Coping” somehow sounds as much like techno as it does Fugazi. “C’mon Dive” uses a chopped-up, high-pitched vocal sample the way a jungle song might, and ups the ante for Magaletti’s roiling drums, which sound as colossal as the Hoover Dam. It’d be a weird DJ that could play this song, but a DJ nonetheless.