If you’ve ever wanted Suicide’s cold menace, Prostitute’s noise-rock snarl, and Model/Actriz’s maximalist dance-floor chaos to get locked in a room together and fight it out, congratulations — Los Angeles trio tankerlow have basically done it for you. Their debut album ‘SLAGROOM’ drops September 25th via Danger Collective Records, and based on lead single “YES, I AM AN ANIMAL” (which just landed on Spotify’s Fresh Finds), this one’s going to leave a mark.
Listen Now
tankerlow is Guy Azulay, Connor Scheff, and Kyle Norvell, and ‘SLAGROOM’ is the sound of two years spent meticulously, obsessively building something that splits at the seams on purpose. Every song here feels engineered (literally — Scheff handled production duties) to hold tension without ever letting it resolve cleanly. Light vs. dark, right vs. wrong, reality vs. lies, quiet vs. loud — these aren’t just album talking points, they’re the actual architecture of the record, playing out in the push-pull between whisper-quiet verses and full-body noise eruptions.
A Record Born From Looking Inward
For Azulay, ‘SLAGROOM’ doubled as a crash course in songwriting and self-discovery. As he puts it:
“The album’s concept manifested by looking at my own life, observing what battles were happening inside my head. A lot of my lyrics are based around insecurity and these false ideations of who I am as a person.”
That internal tug-of-war is all over the record, building toward something that feels less like a tracklist and more like a slow march toward a breakdown — charged, engulfing, relentless. It’s heavy stuff, but tankerlow make it feel cathartic rather than punishing, which is exactly the kind of tightrope walk that makes a debut album worth paying attention to.
C'mon why don't you leave a comment here