$18 adv., $20 door. 21+
Oneida is an American experimental rock band from Brooklyn, New York, United States. Their influences include psychedelic rock, krautrock, electronic, noise rock, and minimalism, but the overall structure and intent of their music is not taken directly from any of these styles.Common elements found in their music include improvisation, repetition, driving rhythms, antique and analog equipment, and an overall eclecticism.
A song is a song until it isn’t, until it’s pushed to its limits and beyond to become harder, faster and more dissonant. The music on Oneida’s 17th full-length album, Expensive Air, all started as tightly structured, melodic rock songs—very much in line with the non-stop bangers of Success from 2022—but along the way, they changed.
Bobby Matador sketched the structures of these songs from his home base in Boston, then sent the demos to Oneida’s New York contingent: Kid Millions, Hanoi Jane, Shahin Motia and Barry London. “We were working out thesongs in New York without Bobby. We would start out riding the riffs, and then Shahin and Jane would add wild, out-of-tune licks,” said Kid Millions. “It seemed so perfect.”
Oneida has long straddled gray-area boundaries between the NYC punk/psych/rock world and the art/experimental world, playing at gritty rock clubs and elevated cultural institutions, including the Guggenheim, MoMA PS1, ICA London, MassMOCA and the Knoxville Museum of Art. The band has been known for extended live improvisational performances, collaborating onstage with Mike Watt, members of Flaming Lips, Portishead, Boredoms, Yo La Tengo, Dead C, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and many others. Oneida’s members juggle a wide variety of other music projects. Drummer Kid Millions has played with Spiritualized, Royal Trux and Boredoms and releases solo compositions under his own name and as Man Forever. Shahin Motia founded noise-punk’s Ex Models and currently plays in Knyfe Hits. Kid and Fat Bobby perform and release music as People of the North, and Bobby's outside projects New Pope and Nurse & Soldier each released new albums in 2023.
Oneida’s previous album, Success, came after a four-year hiatus, unleashing the band’s pent up creative energy in a set of catchy, accessible, nearly poppy songs. Song structure remained important in the run up towards Expensive Air, but so was the instinctual, improvisatory interplay that has always been a part of Oneida’s process.The band had been playing live together for two years, sharpening its attack and pushing its songs to go harder, faster and wilder.
Oneida recorded Expensive Airin three sessions scattered across 2023, convening at Colin Marston’s Menegroth The ThousandCaves studio in Woodhaven, Queens, whenever they had a few songs ready. Marston and the band mixed the album in February 2024 at Menegroth.
The new album expands on what Oneida achieved with Success, but also pushes past it, laying down irresistible song structures then blowing them to psychedelic bits. “I found myself thinking about this record as a darker, looser, louder, counterpart to Success,” Bobby explains. “Both records charge forward from the jump and mix the elliptical with the blunt, and longing with self-mockery. But Successis like laughing in a car gunning carelessly through an ice storm, and Expensive Airis how you laugh at yourself as the car spins into the ditch, or a tree. Same trip, but a little closer to the bone.”
Kinski is a four-piece rock band from Seattle, WA. The band follows their instincts to explore pathways from visceral guitar rock, to sonic and heady avant-psych rock, and sparse, atmosphere-bending instrumentals. NME has described Kinski as: “Like Sabbath in a washing machine during a power surge.” Comprised of guitarists Chris Martin and Matthew Reid-Schwartz (Matthew also plays keyboards and flute), bassist Lucy Atkinson, and drummer Barrett Wilke,
The four mammoth slabs that make up Terry Gross’s new album, Huge Improvement, are driving, unrelenting excursions into the unknown. Whether burning white-hot or smoldering in plumes of smoke, the pieces stretch as much inwardly as they do cosmically, embracing every surprising turn.