Tritonic’s new single, Alexamenos!, is more than just a song — it’s a statement of intent, a declaration of war against genre boundaries, and a dazzling prelude to their uncompromising upcoming album Bend the Arc!. Like a burst of light from the solar plexus, the track hits hard and unrelenting, a sledgehammer of sludge-metal weight colliding with infectious, melodic power-pop guitar duels. It’s chaotic, beautiful, and entirely intentional.
At its heart, Alexamenos! is an exercise in contradiction and collision. Played on the band’s own handmade fretless guitars — a deliberate act of both destruction and creation — the song resists the sterile precision of many modern genres. The absence of frets isn’t a gimmick; it’s a philosophical stance. By removing those physical markers, Tritonic opens the door to dissonance, microtonal instability, and emotional ambiguity, allowing their music to drift closer to the infinite — both literally and sonically.
Musically, Tritonic manages to pull off something rare: an abrasive yet strangely catchy experience. The track mixes the bleak doom of Acid Bath with the twin-guitar heroism of Baroness, fusing sludge, punk, and a tinge of indie charm. It’s raw and unpolished in the best way, embracing imperfection as a portal to transcendence.
The accompanying video for Alexamenos! perfectly matches the sound’s chaotic beauty. Made entirely with DIY practical effects — including a kit-bashed spaceship, swirling colored ink in water, and thick lashings of gold paint — the visuals are tactile, surreal, and deeply symbolic. The narrative sees pilots navigating a medieval T and O map in a rickety spacecraft, visually representing Tritonic’s exploration of time, history, and metaphysical contradiction. Ancient and futuristic, analogue and digital, the band makes these binaries collide just as forcefully as their guitars do.
It’s no coincidence that Alexamenos! shares its name with the earliest known depiction of Jesus — a graffitied crucifixion caricature scrawled into a Roman wall, mocking a worshipper of a donkey-headed deity. That subversive, sacrilegious tension is deeply embedded in Tritonic’s ethos. The song feels like it’s challenging not just musical norms but cultural and spiritual ones, too.
As a single, Alexamenos! serves as a perfect entry point into the dense, self-imposed mythology of Tritonic’s upcoming second full-length, Bend the Arc!. The album — which will only be available as a wax-dipped cassette, shunning all streaming platforms — is both an artistic artifact and a provocation. In a world of instant, disembodied access, Tritonic demands physical engagement. To listen, you must destroy the packaging, a symbolic sacrifice mirroring the band’s own creative destruction in the studio.
Tritonic have never been content to play within the lines. From their diasporic origins in the Indian Ocean, to their globe-spanning reunion and critically praised works like Port of Spain and Algae Bloom, the band has always been in flux — physically, musically, spiritually. With Alexamenos!, they now solidify their reputation as visionaries at the intersection of noise and nuance.
This single isn’t just a teaser for an album — it’s a gauntlet thrown at the feet of modern music. Tritonic doesn’t just play songs; they invoke something cosmic. Alexamenos! is urgent, strange, and undeniably human. And if this is the beginning of what Bend the Arc! promises to be, we’re in for something truly transcendent.
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