Coilguns wants to confront a failing world, but "Everything We Love, We Destroy" sounds too exhausted to move bodies. This tension is central to the album.
Rebel Noise been covering the Swiss noise-rock band: "Fresh, piercing noise-rock from Coilguns," "Coilguns Unleash New Album Odd Love with Explosive Single ‘Generic Skincare’!," "Coilguns Unleash New Single 'Carbon Magic' Ahead of Upcoming Album," and "Coilguns doesn’t stop believing."
But the songwriting here doesn't connect, and too little of the recording makes me think, "At least it sounds really fucking good."
Coilguns describes its aim as a loud fight for calm. The lyrics take on environmental collapse, the fading prospects for peace and cooperation, and the exhaustion of trying to care about it at all. That exhaustion comes to define the album.
It’s easy to fixate on everything that might go wrong. I do it all the time. But doomerism is never the answer. It leaves me pessimistic about the possibility of change, and I drag.
The title track opens with restraint where I want release. It has a message, but it doesn’t move me. "Peace Trader" has a stronger pull, making the opener feel like a missed opportunity.
"Replication Crisis" also starts downbeat, but a beautifully brutal bass line and a brief, super-powered guitar riff jolt it awake.
"Platform Decay" turns bad-news overload into a computing metaphor: "We can’t compute; everything's too distant; the news is too violent, we can't compute." It’s clever. I often hear people say they’re trying to "process" an emotion or event, and that metaphor dehumanizes; here, "we can't compute" captures the album's helplessness, and I'm left feeling the fatigue the lyrics describe.
"Punisher Disclaimer" nearly turns things around. Its gritty bass and guitar carry a more violent, intense charge, and for a moment the instruments thrill. It's the album’s best moment. Along with "Peace Trader" and "Replication Crisis," it offers flashes of life the rest of the record needs more of. In my lifetime, people who care about these issues have made a difference—even against adversity.
