Seattle’s Newaxeyes plays with tensions and contradictions. Merging dark electronics, hip-hop, and experimental rock and metal to refract the volatility, paranoia, and catharsis of the post-Information Age, the band carefully weaves orchestrated and recklessly warped instrumentals into something entirely their own.
Their debut album, BLACK FAX, produced by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Wolves In The Throne Room), is a testament to the band’s genre-agnostic approach to music. A quartet of skilled multi-instrumentalists, Jordan Rundle (Guitar/Synths), Bret Gardín (Synths), Tyler Coray (Guitar) and William Hayes (Guitar/Synths) draw inspiration from a wide variety of places and seamlessly merge them into songs that are as abrasive as they are cinematic.
Since forming in 2013, Newaxeyes has pursued a diverse range of projects within and beyond a traditional band structure. Versatile performers with backgrounds in modern composition, sound design, film and visual art, their wide-angle vision has encompassed various multimedia projects, art collaborations, and large-scale works – including 2015’s The 8th Passenger, a 2-hour-long live rescoring of Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror classic ‘Alien’, performed to a sold-out cinema.
Members of Newaxeyes have toured as synth/keyboardist of Wolves in the Throne Room, recorded guitars on the forthcoming Myrkur album (2017, Relapse Records) and performed electronic drums on post-punk pioneers Sort Sol’s Stor Langsom Stjerne (2017, Columbia Records).
“Their sound is a bleakly post-modern collage of influences and inferences, always threatening to unspool, but kept together through artful stitching and bloody-minded purpose.” —Kyle Fleck, The Stranger
“Newaxeyes don’t really sound like anybody else in Seattle… They use samplers, crazy distorted synth drums, gut shaking digital low-end, and gorgeous guitar melodies (that often descend into chaos) to make this music that sounds like the internet holding a funeral dirge for the death of humankind.” —Kelton Sears, Seattle Weekly
On their release “The 8th Passenger”: “Last year at Northwest Film Forum, Seattle quartet Newaxeyes performed a live soundtrack for Ridley Scott’s classic Alien; they did the 1979 sci-fi horror film justice, and then some…Newaxeyes’ score vividly captures the godforsaken foreboding and nerve-racking claustrophobia that permeate Alien—as well as including some interludes of forlorn beauty. The band displays a masterly command of dynamics and textures that out-scare (out-Skerritt?) the work of original soundtracker Jerry Goldsmith. The 8th Passenger could be the start of a long, rewarding career in cinema for Newaxeyes.” - Dave Segal, The Stranger
On their release “Assange/Church”: “This is certainly one of the most hard-to-pin-down releases I have listened to this year…[Assange is] a grim techno trip with a crystalline guitar line as the main guide. Just as intriguing is the slightly dissonant closer, “Church”, which starts off with a chirping synth wading through choppy bursts of noise and growling guitar, then abruptly transitions into a weird, murky hip-hop beat. This collective can sculpt left-of-center noise into something danceable.” -Foreign Accents
No shows booked at the moment.
Twitter