Seventeen years is a long time to wait. But when the band in question is Ghinzu — Belgium’s most restlessly creative rock export — the silence only makes the arrival hit harder. ’W.O.W.A,’ their fourth studio album and first since 2009’s ‘Mirror Mirror’, is out now via Play It Again Sam, and it sounds like a band who’ve spent two decades storing up ideas, then detonating them all at once.
The Brussels-born art-rockers didn’t exactly take it easy getting here, either. Frontman John Descamps and the band — Mika Hasson (bass), Greg Remy (guitar), Jean Waterlot (guitar/keys), and Antoin Michel (drums) — sifted through nearly 90 fully developed ideas before landing on the 13 tracks that make up ‘W.O.W.A’. “We had all these hard drives everywhere,” Descamps recalls. “We wanted to gather 10 tracks together to really represent all those years of condensed work.”
What they’ve landed on feels like a genuine creative milestone — taut, vibrant, emotionally loaded, and packed with the kind of incisive detail that rewards repeated listens. Descamps describes the band’s approach to creativity as almost philosophical: “We considered creativity as a paradox. You inspire, then you expire. It’s the process of being alive. It’s raw and violent but has to be sophisticated and emotional at the same time. Some lines were predicted, others were accidents.”
Back to Basics, Then Beyond
With prior singles Out of Control, Snow White, and Forever already picking up support from Radio X and Scientists of Sound, ‘W.O.W.A’ sees Ghinzu return to the raw energy of their formative influences — the theatrical bombast of Queen, the grunge noise of Nirvana and The Melvins — while simultaneously pushing into new territory. Painters Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon are namechecked as visual touchstones, and that makes sense: this is music that feels sculpted as much as played, each track carrying the weight and texture of something worked and reworked until it holds its own shape.
W.O.W.A (Short Film)
Alongside the album, Ghinzu have shared a stunning 8-minute audio-visual — W.O.W.A (Short Film) — directed by Brussels filmmaker Arnaud Uyttenhove and produced by CAVIAR. It’s not a conventional music video; it’s more of a cinematic extension of the record’s emotional world. Uyttenhove describes it as “a collection of fragments… exploring universal emotions and struggles tied to youth, where everything still feels possible, yet the first cracks already begin to appear.” Shot across a suspended summer between friends, identities blur, faces shift, and the line between band and subject dissolves entirely. It’s gorgeous, disorienting stuff — and a perfect visual companion to an album that deals in exactly those kinds of contradictions.
“For me,” Uyttenhove adds, “it is above all an ode to youth: sensitive, bruised, sometimes lost, searching for its place, loving too intensely, protecting itself poorly, and transforming its wounds into light.“
A Legacy Worth the Wait
If you’re new to Ghinzu, here’s your crash course: debut album ‘Electronic Jacuzzi’ (2000) announced them as something genuinely different; ‘Blow’ (2004) sold over 100,000 copies across Europe and put them on stages alongside Muse, Placebo, and Iggy & The Stooges; ‘Mirror Mirror’ (2009) cemented their reputation as one of mainland Europe’s most compelling rock acts. Their music even found its way onto the soundtrack of global thriller smash Taken. Not bad for a band from Brussels.
‘W.O.W.A’ might just be the record that defines them entirely.
‘W.O.W.A’ track list
1. When Other Worlds Await
2. Snow White
3. Out of Control
4. Forever
5. Morning Lights
6. Mathias is Gone
7. Apologies
8. It’s The Law
9. #quietluxury
10. Fool
11. Death Race
12. Master Bluff
13. Breathless
W.O.W.A by Ghinzu is out now via Play It Again Sam.
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