Moin at Band on the Wall
Johnny James, Managing Editor
Are Moin a band or are they something else? This seems to be a recurring hang-up of critics, who often begin reviews of Moin’s music with a short thesis on which label is the best fit for this project. In fairness, these are murky waters. Moin don’t really have a singer, or even write songs in the traditional sense. Instead they rely heavily on samples and guest vocalists, while deconstructing a range of guitar-based genres. This ambiguity, this fluidity, is their power, allowing them to pursue a thrilling slash-and-burn ethos to music-making.
Moin’s reimagining of the traditional band dynamic feels less a product of intent and more a product of the members’ musical experience. For a decade preceding the trio’s debut album in 2021, Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews were known as the electronic duo Raime, who, alongside musical peers Pete Swanson, Andy Stott and The Haxan Cloak, made stark, gaze-averting tracks influenced by industrial music, Detroit techno and ’80s goth subculture. The heavy use of samples is just what they know.
Meeting percussionist Valentina Magaletti (known for projects such as Vanishing Twin, Tomaga, and Lafawandah) was the spark for trying something different – an experimentation with guitars and live drums. Moot! saw the newly formed Moin pursue an asymmetrical kind of post-hardcore, worshipping at the altar of bands like Slint, Shellac and Unwound, but with a dance-music framework. On their second album, Paste, they drilled down on vocal samples, with snippets of spoken word artfully disintegrating over the top of worming guitar riffs, warped electronics and off-kilter beats.
As is their wont, the band (band?) decided to switch up the formula again for their third album, which dropped at the end of 2024. You Never End features contributions from an extensive roster of vocalists, most of whom are drawn from label AD 93’s Rolodex of affiliates, including Irish “heavy pop” musician Olan Monk, New York ambient pop artist James K and post-grime South East London vocalist Coby Sey. Instead of cryptic vocal samples culled from the internet, now we get voices with names and faces. Something that was once just out of reach is now within our grasp.
Carrying Moin’s signature undercurrent of unease, the album is the trio’s most atmospheric yet, dismantling the tropes of both guitar music and dance, and rebuilding them in a way that feels familiar but unsettling, like a surrealist collage. Magaletti stars as the rhythmic driving force, her motorik precision the bedrock for some brilliant, disorientating guitar polyrhythms on tracks like ‘Cubby’ and ‘C’mon Dive’. But it’s those vocal collaborators that define this album, bringing something palpably human to the weird, haunted soundworld that is Moin’s bread and butter.
In the face of critics grappling for a label by which to define the project, this new focus on words could be Moin’s own self-definition, albeit a characteristically hazy one, full of ellipses and question marks. A standout moment comes with Al-Maria’s recitation on ‘Lift You’, which feels like an attempt at putting words to the elusive emotions that drive Moin’s music: “To feel like a failure, to stop trying/To change the subject, to prefer not to talk/To laugh, to joke, to ask/Some new friends, an old question that’s been bothering me/Do you believe one can love unconditionally?”
It’s not just a great album, it’s an interesting album, harkening back to a time when a more adventurous take on rock was a mainstay in the musical landscape. It’s the sound of a band (band?) making music on their own terms, defiantly at odds with the post-post-post punk zeitgeist that continues to define London’s underground music scene – and you’ve got to respect that.
It’s been a couple of years since Moin last played in Manchester – suitably at The White Hotel, back in 2023. And while that venue’s got the right vibe, Band on the Wall’s got the right sound system. It’ll be a treat to catch them in there on 28 May.
