Texas Two - Chronovisor (2025)
Artist: Texas Two
Author: Sarah
Date: 03/03/2026
Listen: Bandcamp
If machine translation can be trusted, in the description for Chronovisor, Disanorak Records founder Tiok writes about believing that Arga has only listened to the Vaselines his entire life. Now, when you hear about a duo whose primary influence is the Vaselines, you might get it in your head that they're going to sound exactly like the Vaselines. But instead, Texas Two sucker punches us with easily the most brutally noisy indiepop I've ever heard.
Things get started off with a lackadaisical count-in from Anya, before immediately hitting the listener with an absolutely massive wall of noise and pretty much just the bare minimum amount of song required to qualify as "pop". It's not much more than the lines "you're my cruel crush / my teenage cruel crush" circling over and over, drilling its way into your head. It's not good by any traditional standards of quality, but it's totally effective at battering the listener into submission and making the next few songs (which still rank among the noisiest I've ever heard) seem almost reasonable.
Most of the album actually is about what you'd expect from great noise pop: they've got a low rumbling bass and some of the screechiest guitars you'll ever hear, like probably even on par with the Reids in that respect. The songs themselves are pretty much just serviceable at best, with fairly weak vocal performances (my understanding is that vocalists Anya and Elvina both recorded their vocals separately from the rest of the song), but that's all true of Psychocandy too. For me, the strongest songs are probably "Chinese New Year", which sounds like someone's alternating between Beat Happening's "Noise" and a Merzbow album, and "Chia, I've Made You a Song", featuring guest vocals from Aggi singer Rega (who turns in the album's best vocal performance) and a pretty effective call-and-response on variations of "Chia, I [verb] you / Why don't you [verb] me?". It's all capped off with the forbodingly calm "Broken Serenade", turning into yet another wall of noise on "You're All I Loved".
As you can imagine, Chronovisor certainly isn't an indiepop album for the faint of heart. It is, bar none, the absolute harshest album I have ever heard, and it only even barely qualifies as pop in the first place. Like, I'm not so far gone as to recognize that I'm talking about this album the way you might talk about getting beat up by a street gang, even as I'm trying to explain why it's my favorite discovery of the year. But if you're an absolute freak for noise pop, someone who listens to Psychocandy and wishes it were less tame, someone who sees me saying "I had to turn the volume down" as the compliment that it truly is, then you're someone who needs to hear this album yesterday.