{"id":45745,"date":"2026-06-19T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T21:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cultureaddicts.com\/?p=45745"},"modified":"2026-06-17T18:49:46","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T22:49:46","slug":"ghinzu-return-after-17-years-with-new-album-w-o-w-a-and-it-was-worth-the-wait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cultureaddicts.com\/?p=45745","title":{"rendered":"Ghinzu return after 17 years with new album \u2018W.O.W.A\u2019 \u2014 and it was worth the wait"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Seventeen years is a long time to wait. But when the band in question is Ghinzu \u2014 Belgium’s most restlessly creative rock export \u2014 the silence only makes the arrival hit harder. \u2019W.O.W.A<\/strong>,\u2019 their fourth studio album and first since 2009’s ‘Mirror Mirror’, is out now via Play It Again Sam<\/strong>, and it sounds like a band who’ve spent two decades storing up ideas, then detonating them all at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brussels-born art-rockers didn’t exactly take it easy getting here, either. Frontman John Descamps<\/strong> and the band \u2014 Mika Hasson (bass), Greg Remy (guitar), Jean Waterlot (guitar\/keys), and Antoin Michel (drums) \u2014 sifted through nearly 90 fully developed ideas<\/strong> 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What they’ve landed on feels like a genuine creative milestone \u2014 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Basics, Then Beyond<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

With prior singles Out of Control<\/em>, Snow White<\/em>, and Forever<\/em> 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 \u2014 the theatrical bombast of Queen, the grunge noise of Nirvana and The Melvins \u2014 while simultaneously pushing into new territory. Painters Gerhard Richter<\/strong> and Francis Bacon<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W.O.W.A (Short Film)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Alongside the album, Ghinzu have shared a stunning 8-minute audio-visual<\/strong> \u2014 W.O.W.A (Short Film)<\/em> \u2014 directed by Brussels filmmaker Arnaud Uyttenhove<\/strong> 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.<\/em>” 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 \u2014 and a perfect visual companion to an album that deals in exactly those kinds of contradictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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