SPILLINGS – SPILLINGS
Montreal’s Big|Brave and Melbourne’s MY DISCO share a common affinity for a minimalist approach to music, if one that takes somewhat different form in the hands of each artist. Big|Brave’s thunderous post-rock and drone metal is propelled by the reverberant roar of booming one-chord melodies, whereas MY DISCO’s brutalist post-punk is built on repetition rather than the slow fragmentation of a song’s core. Yet while in practice their methods might be different, they’re kindred spirits, distilling dark, heavy music down to its starkest elements.
It feels only natural that Big|Brave’s Mat Ball and MY DISCO’s Liam Andrews should end up being co-conspirators in crafting a new form of stripped-down noise and minimalist mayhem. They’re already bandmates, so to speak; Andrews is a fairly recent addition to Big|Brave’s live show, lending low-end textures to their already imposing sound. But as SPILLINGS, Ball and Andrews carve out a markedly different path via pulsing industrial thump and feedback-driven squall, lending both primitive pummel and at-times dancefloor adjacent minimal wave chill to their splendidly sculpted cacophony.
Released at the beginning of 2026 without announcement or fanfare, SPILLINGS’ debut album leaves a deep impression through its hypnotic undercurrent of menace and Ball’s cascading waves of feedback-laden guitar. An abstract dirge like the album’s first proper song, “Precaution,” gets a lot of mileage out of relatively sparse elements, Ball’s melancholy guitar bellows punctuated by the barest heartbeat of a rhythm as well as ample moments of silence, as Andrews returns to an unsettling mantra-like phrase, “The reactionary is in you.” But they just as often aim for heavier and harder hitting moments like that of “40 Grit,” something like industrial techno stomped out with analog materials, evoking a band like Mandy, Indiana as it finds the place where an antagonistic pummel becomes seductive.
An unexpected groove seeps its way into SPILLINGS’ compositions deeper into the album, lending a song like “Skinned” an accessibility that’s not always apparent in the duo’s more spacious or aggressive songs. Ball sticks mostly to strumming chords, a method he often bypasses in favor of less conventional guitar techniques, and the shift works stunningly here, its subtly jagged sound underscoring the harrowing intimacy in Andrews’ nigh-whispered imagery, “Skinned, but still breathing… a blade between us.” And against blood-curdling background wails and rhythmic plunks, “Terminal Agitation” takes shape as a surprisingly catchy synth-punk pulse, Throbbing Gristle and Suicide colliding beneath stormclouds of excoriating noise.
Songs like “Terminal Agitation,” or for that matter the bulk of SPILLINGS’ debut LP, require a certain amount of patience in order to see the whole of their form. Yet unlike with, say, ambient music, the duo put up a lot more resistance through abrasive textures and nightmarish effects. Their in-studio setup might still comprise a relatively small number of tools at their disposal, but the spectrum of sound it yields proves their approach to be anything but limiting.
Label: The Garrote
Year: 2026
Similar Albums:
